Month: May 2021

Torn Asunder, by Michael Todd

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

Katie Maddison is just your average chemistry college student, until she gets kidnapped for use by a Satanic cult, intent on summoning a demonic entity. Fortunately, she is saved from a fate worse than death, and is rescued just in time by a group of warriors known as “The Damned”. However, by that point, said demonic entity – going by the name of Pandora – has embedded herself inside Katie. The good news is, it’s less possession than symbiosis, with Pandora largely happy to chill and pass snarky comment. Though her presence acts as a supernatural power-up, enhancing her host’s strength, speed and healing abilities. The fact Katie is not under control of her dark passenger gets her an invite to join the group on their mission “to protect the uninformed from reality.” As their creed goes, “The sheep can sleep at night, because we don’t.”

The glaring issue here is the complete lack of threat the scenario presents. There are plenty of hints that Pandora is a powerful demon – perhaps even one of the “Seventy-Two”, the top echelon of Hell’s denizens. Yet, in this volume, she proves to be an entirely benign presence – or, as mentioned, very helpful to Katie in her new career. There’s certainly nothing which justifies her telling Pandora, “You are seriously one of the evillest people I have ever met.” She’s a bigger threat to others of her own kind, even helping Katie exorcise a lesser demon from one of her colleagues. Now, I suspect she may be playing a long game – this is an eight-volume series, so virtually everything here is going to be a long game. But combine the demon’s inaction and the relative ease with which the Damned take out virtually every other hell-spawn they meet [the only significant injury suffered is closer to suicide by demon], and you’ve got something in desperate need of additional peril. I would settle for simply extra challenge, since Katie breezes through everything with hardly any apparent effort.

Going by the notes at the end, it’s not quite clear how much Todd actually wrote, of what seems a collaborative effort. He says he was the creator and main script-writer, but “I’m not the person who was responsible for turning the script into the longer story.” Still, his name is on the cover, so he gets the blame. Debra Dunbar showed how demonic possession can be handled in an entertaining way, and Todd [perhaps better known under his Michael Anderle name, for the Kurtherian Gambit series] could learn a lot from Dunbar. Both in establishing your Satanic presence, which here comes over as little beyond a slightly more foul-mouthed version of Paris Hilton, and then in creating a credible threat for your protagonist. Instead, it plays a bit like an entry-level tutorial for a video-game, and certainly falls rather short of the “Supernatural Action Adventure Opera” touted in the book’s sub-title.

Author: Michael Todd
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 8 in the Protected by the Damned series.

Lady Detective Shadow

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★★★
“CSI: Shacheng”

The heroine of this period piece us Sima Feiyan (Shang), a roaming law officer, currently in the process of tracking down a gang of four criminals. She successfully nails three in the opening sequence, and tracks the fourth to the city of Shacheng. There, she meets up with old friend Wu Jing Ping (Qi) and his son, Jingbin (Zhang R.B.). She gets diverted by the case of a missing person, which takes to a nearby inn, where a host of suspicious figures are gathering. Turns out, there’s a lost city reported to be accessible only once every 49 years, and treasure hunters are gathering for the chase. Unsurprisingly, this ends up being connected to the missing person, the criminal she seeks and even the Wu family.

While more or less shamelessly lifting elements from sources as diverse as Sherlock Holmes, Dragon Inn and Indiana Jones, as well as the TV show noted above, this Chinese TV movie does so with enough energy and invention of its own to make for an entertaining time. Sima is rather like the great detective, though this “Sherlock” is rather more pugilistic than Conan Doyle’s version – or even Robert Downey’s! She is able to look at a scene and “see” in her mind how things rolled out – hence the CSI comparison – and is accompanied by a plucky (but less talented) sidekick, Ye Zi (Zhang P.Y), basically the Watson to her Holmes. There’s no shortage of action, save perhaps at the end, which was a bit disappointing. Much running around a trap-laden underground complex (coughTempleOfDoomcough!), but not the grandstand climax I wanted.

Up until then, however, it has been genuinely a good bit of fun. It takes a little bit of a while for the story to settle down, yet when it does, it’s a genre mash-up that provides decent value, despite the occasionally ropey bit of green-screen work. Shang has just the right approach to the role. She portrays Sima as possessing a calm demeanour, even when provoked, and as someone takes her job seriously; that makes the viewer take events seriously as well. It’s Ye Zi who generally provides the film’s lighter moments, and gets shunted off to one side for the climax. The action is not bad. It does suffer a little from the hyper-kinetic editing, yet is still capable of being followed. There’s enough invention that the viewer should be willing to cut it some slack, and there certainly no shortage, which helps.

It feels like the pilot episode for a TV series, and does a solid job of establishing the general situation and the characters. This kind of “historical crime investigator” seems to be a mini-trend in the Far East, with franchises such as Detective Dee in China, or the Korean Detective K. This is the first I’ve seen which goes with a woman, and while not perfect, it’s sprightly enough that I’ve certainly be interested in seeing more of its heroine.

Dir: Si Shu-bu
Star: Shang Rong, Zhang Pei Yu, Qi Jingbin, Zhang Ren Bo

Pocket Full of Game

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★★
“Game, in only the loosest sense.”

Porsha (Nunez) – and before you ask, yes, that’s how it’s spelled in the credits – is a small-time hustler, operating in the dodgier neighbourhoods of New York. When getting away from her latest escapade, she bumps into the crew of Fresh (Garcia) and his pals, who are similarly engaged, having just robbed a drug dealer. Due to flakiness on the part of one of the team, they’re looking for a new member, and Porsha successfully convinces Fresh that she is a good fit for the role. However, the rest of the gang are less convinced, and force Porsha to prove her loyalty by committing cold-blooded murder. That does her head in, and she holes up in Atlanta for a bit. Returning, she finds Fresh and her former associated have moved on, and attempts to pull off a job on her own, to get back in their graces. It doesn’t go well, shall we say, and Porsha finds herself on Rikers Island, facing a double-homicide charge.

There are a number of concerns here, of varying levels. The biggest problem is that this is 126 minutes long, and doesn’t have anything like the content to justify such a running tine. Every other scene is unnecessary, or runs to excessive length, and this causes significant issues with pacing. The script frequently seems to forget about its own threads; for example, after one robbery, a survivor vows to take revenge on Porsha, Fresh and their associates, for their actions. This only happens at the very end, and the cinematic amnesia becomes increasingly aggravating as the movie diverts instead into another pointless shit-hop montage, or irrelevant flashback to Porsha’s childhood. Another difficulty is, the resources aren’t able to handle some of the demands of the script: it is extremely obvious that the court-room required by it, isn’t anything like the real thing. The same goes for the prison, and the film only ever reaches close to convincing, or even comfortable, when it’s operating on the streets.

On the positive side, Nunez’s performance is solid enough to work, though a lot of the cast may be better suited for supporting roles than lead ones.  There were also just enough scenes that worked to keep me from hitting the off-button. In particular, the sequence where she’s made to kill, is surprisingly shocking, even in a film that clearly has no qualms about casual violence (and whose morality is about as far from “crime doesn’t pay” as could be imagined – indeed, this seems to be a world where it’s the only employment available). The problem is, the ratio of these scenes to the those which are deficient, for one or more of the reasons explained above, is about 1:10. This is apparently based on a novel, and the trailer for the book [yes, that’s apparently a thing] calls it “A hood soap opera.” I can’t argue with that – though it’s not such a positive thing, as the makers seem to think.

Dir: Deborah Cardona
Star: Katherine Nunez, Carlos Garcia, David L Holley, Joey Ortiz

Sugar Boxx

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★★
“Is that a machete?”

I completely get what the director here is trying to do: make a homage to the seventies women-in-prison movies, made by the likes of director Jack Hill (who has a cameo here as a judge). The plot here, certainly, feels like it’s almost a straight-up copy, in particular from Bruno Mattei’s 1982 film, Violence in a Women’s Prison. Both have undercover journalists who get themselves sent to prison as an inmate, in order to expose the corruption of those running the facility. In this case, it’s TV reporter Valerie March (Anderson), who is asked to look into the dubious Sugar State Women’s Prison by the aunt of an inmate.

Naturally, it turns out the prisoners get sent there in order to become prostitutes for the warden, Beverly Buckner (Dona), who has a cosy arrangement with various suppliers to the jail. March, in her incarcerated alter ego, becomes part of the out-call service, though matters are complicated by one of the suppliers, chicken magnate Gilbert Sackry (Hunter), being the subject of one of her previous exposes. After tragedy strikes, the scheme is revealed, only for it to be swept under the carpet by authorities. March is having none of this, the system having failed to bring them justice, and with the help of former inmate pal Loretta (Brown, in the Pam Grier role) and a repentant guard, sets out to take revenge on Buckner and the rest of her cronies.

The films which inspired this were never high-end product. But in comparison to this, they are Avatar. The paucity of the resources here is all too often painfully obvious. The “prison” consists of a couple of tents in a field; while this could be a nod to infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and his “Tent City”, the absence of… oh, I dunno: fences or bars, is glaring. In the early going, I was prepared to overlook this, since there’s enough energy (and, let’s be honest, gratuitous nudity) to sustain interest. As well as Hill, there’s a cameo by GWG goddess Tura Satana, also playing a judge; another Russ Meyer muse, Kitten Natividad, plays a prison guard, and is fun to watch in that role.

However, the previously mentioned tragedy flicks a cinematic switch. Valerie’s reaction to it is laughably bad, and she’s then taken to a “hospital”, which we only know is a hospital, because it has a large Red Cross flag tacked to the wall. As hospitals do. The lack of effort put in finally overpowered my goodwill, and there was little thereafter which proved capable of taking up the slack. It really needed more actresses capable of going full-throttle into their roles here. While Brown seems to have a decent handle on her role – even if she’s no Grier – Anderson is too anodyne to make the necessary impact. The further we get into the film, the less her ability to hold the audience’s attention, and interest withers and eventually dies, as a direct result.

Dir: Cody Jarrett
Star: Geneviere Anderson, The’la Brown, Linda Dona, Jack Hunter

The Spy

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★★★½
“Don’t expect any applause. That doesn’t exist in our line of work.”

I guess the moral here is that things aren’t necessarily as they appear, and the truth can take quite some time to come out. After World War II, Norwegian actress Sonja Wigert was largely shunned, her career going downhill because she was seen as having fraternized with the German forces that had occupied Norway. She died in 1980, largely forgotten. But in 2005, it was revealed that Wigert (Berdal) had actually been operating as a spy on behalf of the Swedish government, who were very much concerned the Nazis had their country next on the list for invasion. Her “collaboration” was actually the actress using her fame to get close to high-level officials like Reichskommissar Josef Terboven (Scheer), and get information from them. This film is her story.

However, these already murky matters are complicated by several further factors. There’s an agent, ‘Maria’, working for the Nazis, and passing them information, who must be identified and stopped; Sonja’s “real” relationship, with Hungarian diplomat, Andor Gellért (Chapelle); her father’s incarceration at the hands of the Germans; and, last but not least, Terboven’s request that she become a spy for the Nazis, feeding them information on Sweden. After some early wobbles, the film’s script does a good job of keeping all these elements in play, without collapsing into the over-complex mess sometimes seen in the spy genre. It’s also nicely nuanced, with Wigert initially trying to remain neutral, until circumstances, in the shape of her father’s arrest, force her into getting off the fence.

There begins a very dangerous game – though as an actress, used to playing a role, Sonja seems well-equipped to it. [I was reminded of John Le Carre’s The Little Drummer Girl, which also saw a thespian recruited into becoming a spy] Berndal, who previously made a good impression here as the villainess in Escape (Flukt), does another good job in a rather more sympathetic role as a reluctant secret agent. I’d like to have seen rather more about the tradecraft involved in her work. There are times when her actions seem almost to be too easy, with the security of the Nazis being close to non-existent, as she swans in to offices, and takes snaps of documents. I know a pretty face opens doors, but still…

There are points where it seems to be considerably more concerned with the relationships between the characters: the spy thriller as soap-opera, perhaps? In particular, the Sonja and Andor thread perhaps gets a bit more time than I’d like it to have received. However, it still managed to hold my interest, rather better than those couple of sentences might sound! The performances and period detail both have a ring of authenticity to them, and it’s a sobering reflection of a time where people sometimes had to make sacrifices without recognition. [Sonja’s handler says the lines at the top to her near the end] Sometimes, secrets go to the grave with those who hold them.

Dir: Jens Jonsson
Star: Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, Damien Chapelle, Alexander Scheer, Rolf Lassgård
a.k.a. Spionen

Those Who Wish Me Dead

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★★½
“Ashes to ashes”

I was expecting so much more. The trailer looked really promising, offering the return of Angelina Jolie to full-on action fare, for the first time since Salt in 2010 [yeah, I know we’ve covered Maleficent and its sequel here; probably too much CGI in those to qualify as “full-on”]. Suffice to say, that really isn’t the case. There is, instead, an awful lot of sitting around a fire tower in the middle of a Montana forest, and too much time spent on supporting characters, when what we really wanted was Lara Croft: Fire Jumper. Indeed, there’s a case that Jolie’s character isn’t even the most action-oriented woman here. We’ll get to that later.

She plays Hannah, a former fire jumper – they get parachuted in to the most perilous of situations to try and stop or divert the path of the inferno. She is suffering PTSD after an ill-defined incident which caused her to blame herself for the deaths of three children, even though everyone says there is nothing she could have done. She has been invalided out to a job on the aforementioned tower, watching for smoke that would indicate a fire under way. Separately, forensic accountant Owen Casserly is on the run, because he Knows Too Much, and is ;ooking to hide out with his relation, local sheriff Ethan Sawyer. On the way, he is ambushed, but gives the evidence to his young son, Connor (Little). He runs off into the forest, and is found by Hannah. However, the assassins (Bernthal + Gillen) are keen to tidy up the loose end represented by the boy.

It takes almost 40 minutes for Connor and Hannah to first meet, and it’s well after that before things really kick off. A fire started by the killer as a diversion has become a raging conflagration, which our heroine and her new-found purpose in life have to handle, as well as those hunting them. They do have help, in the shape of Ethan’s wife, Allison (Medina Senghore), who just so happens to run a survival school, and is remarkably athletic for also being six months pregnant. As mentioned, she arguably does more in the way of direct action than Hannah, getting the better of the killers on at least two occasions.

In addition to my disappointment with the star only really getting her hands dirty at the climax, I was also annoyed by Hannah’s PTSD, which is of the cinematic variety. By this I mean, it exists purely for dramatic purposes, and evaporates entirely at the moments when the plot needs her to act competently. Apparently, all you need to do to cure PTSD is pull yourself together, for the sake of an unaccompanied minor. I will say, some of the fire sequences are very well staged, and if forest flames genuinely move that fast, I have a whole new respect for those whose job it is to try and stop them. These sound technical aspects are not enough to negate a palpable sense of underwhelm.

Dir: Taylor Sheridan
Star: Angelina Jolie, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal, Aidan Gillen

In Cold Blood, by Mark Dawson

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A woman called Beatrix, who has made her living as a killer for a shadowy group, find herself betrayed by them, with her husband killed and daughter kidnapped. Escaping their clutches years later, she vows to take revenge on them, one at a time, working up the chain to find the man who ordered the heinous deeds. Yeah, this sounds just a little like Kill Bill, doesn’t it? Indeed, the cover sports a black and yellow color scheme, clearly designed to evoke the Bride’s jumpsuit – and at no point does the heroine here wield a Samurai sword. It’s all so blatant that I can only presume it was done deliberately, though there are certainly some differences.

Not the least of which is the cancer from which Beatrix Rose is suffering, putting an expiration date on her quest. She also has rather more official sanction, since the group in question was part of British intelligence. Since they’re keen for the group’s former head, Control, to be taken out of play, due to what he knows, she still receives help from them, albeit in a thoroughly deniable way. Much of this book is concerned with the hijacking of a cargo ship by Somali pirates, since one of her targets is working as security on the vessel; they’re subsequently held hostage by Islamic terrorists. This complicates her mission significantly, and the action mostly consists of Beatrix infiltrating Somalia, in order to extract her vengeance under cover of the confusion caused by a SEAL rescue mission.

I liked the heroine, even if the nature of her grievance is kept somewhat obscure (I would presume it is revealed in more detail, either later in the series or in one of the three prequels. Alternatively, it may be revealed in another of the author’s works, the John Milton series). She is motivated by a fierce love for her daughter, with whom she has been re-united and whom she is now training – I suspect this will come into play down the road, too – and there’s absolutely no doubt about her competence. Given her ticking clock, there’s no time for romance here, but it still feels like the story is being stretched out; the pages devoted to the hostages add little or nothing to the story we care about.

To be honest, at $4.49 (or $22.45 for the five-ebook set), it’s not particularly good value, considering it comes in at less than 190 pages, excluding the inevitable preview of volume 2. I only picked it up following an accidental purchase of Kindle Unlimited for six months. If you have that, it is probably worth a read, and if time permits, I may end up going deeper into the series, since further volumes (mostly $4.99 each) are included in my KU subscription. It’s not dull, certainly. However, the majority of people are likely better off watching Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which offers just as much mayhem, for considerably less time and expense.

Author: Mark Dawson
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 5 in the Beatrix Rose series.

Dangal

  By

★★★½
“Wrestling with the truth.”

Mahavir Singh Phogat (Khan) is a former Indian national wrestling champion, who dearly wants to pass his skills on to a son, and make him an even more renowned sportsman. Fate, however, has different plans and deals him nothing but daughters as his children. After two of them, Geeta (Shaikh) and Babita (Malhotra) beat up a local kid who was taunting them, Mahavir takes it upon himself to coach the girls in wrestling – despite the doubts of many, including his wife and, not least, the daughters. Geeta, in particular, proves to have the talent necessary to become, first a local and then a national champion. However, success at international level proves elusive, and her father butts heads with national coach, Pramod Kadam (Kulkarni), over training methods. Geeta has to decide who to believe, as she faces her greatest challenge ever, representing the hopes of her nation at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi, in front of a partisan home crowd.

This is basically Sports Movie 1.0.1, with tons of training montages (a way of getting in those musical numbers required by Bollywood), and Geeta overcoming obstacle after obstacle on her way to winning the gold medal in dramatic, last-second fashion. That’s not really a spoiler, since this is based on a true story, Geeta having been the first Indian women to win a wrestling medal in international competition. However, that’s about the extent of the truth here. Rather than having to mount comeback wins in all her bouts, as depicted here, she actually outscored her opponents over the course of the contest by a 15-1 margin. When the facts and the drama are incompatible, the former must be disposed of, clearly. I’m also not quite so sure her father actually was locked in a closet by the Indian wrestling board during her gold medal bout…

Still, it’s impressive that this own the biggest worldwide box-office of any Indian movie ever, mostly due to it becoming an unexpected breakout hit in China. I can see why though, since it’s the kind of plucky underdog story which has almost universal appeal, and despite qualms about its accuracy (to put it mildly), director Tiwari does it justice. While you can certainly argue this is a well-worn path, it’s done with enough energy to make it seem fresh, and the performances are all very solid [additional credit to Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar, who play the younger versions of Geeta and Babita. Shaikh, in particular, really seems to get to grips (hohoho!) with the wrestling sequences, where she is shot in a way that’s clean, rather than hyper-edited.

The results prove reliably dramatic and do as good a job of selling events as they unfold – in addition to amateur wrestling as a spectator sport. If it’s as exciting as here, I’m in [this is, clearly, not to be confused with professional wrestling]. At a whopping 161 minutes in length, there may well have been room to trim some of the extraneous details, or even some of the bouts; we probably don’t need to see every minute of every round of every match in her journey towards the podium. However, I was never bored, and the moments that resonate across cultures more than make up for any slack.

Dir: Nitesh Tiwari
Star: Fatima Sana Shaikh, Aamir Khan, Sanya Malhotra, Girish Kulkarni 

Hollow in the Land

  By

★★★
“Hollow, I must be going…”

This feels like a Canadian version of Winter’s Bone; not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with this, it just results in a slight sense of deja vu. The Miller siblings are already pariahs in their small town. Their mother walked out on them, and father went to jail for a car accident which killed the son of the local sheriff. Brandon has become a teenage delinquent, whom his sister Alison (Agron) is trying to keep from going off the rails entirely. And she’s a lesbian, so isn’t exactly popular either. After the father of Brandon’s girlfriend turns up dead, he vanishes, becoming suspect #1. Alison can’t believe he’s that bad, so goes looking for him. In the process, helped by a sympathetic deputy (Ashmore), she begins to uncover a lot of unpleasant secrets – things the town would much prefer stayed buried.

For the majority of this, it likely fell short of qualifying for the site. Alison has an undeniable persistence, certainly, and her unwavering loyalty to her brother is also laudable. However, the closer she gets to the truth, the greater the importance of physical action becomes. The likely turning point comes when she is out in the woods, and comes across the body of someone who has been shot. The shooter is still nearby, and has Alison in his sights. Thereafter, following an amusing encounter with a pair of female marijuana growers, it becomes clear that talk is no longer getting it done, and it’s time for her to take action. Anyone who says, “Violence isn’t a solution” won’t be happy with the results. But that’s why the film is getting reviewed here!

It’s a very good performance from Agron, who takes a spiky character and makes her easy to like and root for. Alison is someone to whom life has not dealt an easy hand, yet she still persists in trying to do the right thing, in particular towards Brandon. It would certainly be easier, and perhaps even justifiable, for her just to throw up her hands and walk away, leaving him to the consequences of his actions. That unrelenting sense of family is the reason I applied the “mother” tag to this one, even though she’s his sister.

My main issues are likely to do with the plot, which seems to have a number of weaknesses. The biggest one is the identity of the actual murderer. Their motivation fell some way short of feeling compelling, and as a result, their actions seemed more contrived, than flowing naturally out of their situation. There’s also a certain repetitive approach, especially in the front two-thirds, up until the woods incident mentioned above. Seeing Alison approach other residents, and get told to go away, in less polite terms, does get a bit old. And, for Canada, there seem to be a lot of guns around… However, Agron’s performance is enough to hold together this slice of small-town noir, and makes it worth sticking around for the (likely inevitable) bloody finale.

Dir: Scooter Corkle
Star: Dianna Agron, Shawn Ashmore, Rachelle Lefevre, Michael Rogers

The Bag Girls

  By

★★
“From bag to worse.”

Firstly, the cast names listed below are copied verbatim from the movie. I can only presume that “Megan Thee Stallion” was unavailable, but seeing those names pop up in the opening credits does make it difficult to take a film seriously. It’s like you’re watching little children playing dress-up, and a whole level of recursive nonsense, with the actors playing roles, apparently playing roles in the their “real” lives. In other news: kids, get off my damn lawn.

The core pair here are Nola (Ms. The Doll) and Dee (Ms. The Boss. Or Maybe Ms. Love the Boss? Who knows). The former is a stripper, the latter her best friend, who catches her husband cheating, only to be punted to the kerb in favour of the mistress. To extract revenge. the pair recruit Daisy (James) and Crystal (Mi’chelle) and rob the husband. Discovering that crime represents an easier source of income than, say, working for a living, they continue their efforts, gradually working their way up to bigger scores. Eventually, they get a tip-off about a big drug-buy about to go down, but are under strict instructions to take only the cash, and leave the dope. Naturally, Daisy doesn’t listen, and the Cuban owners of the drugs are very keen to retrieve their product.

There’s nothing here you haven’t seen in better films. The film-makers even have their characters openly acknowledge some of the most obvious inspirations at one point or other. This is either extremely brave or perilously reckless, since low-budget movies probably don’t want to be encouraging comparisons with their big siblings:
– What the fuck you think this is, Set It Off, Part II?
– Bitch, this ain’t no motherfucking movie.
Well, actually – yes, it is. Even the title of the film is a result of them referring to each other during their robberies, by designer handbag brands: “We can call each other code names like colors, like Ms. Pink, Ms. Yellow, like they did in Reservoir Dogs, the Quentin Tarantino movie.” I don’t know whether or not to be amused that the writer felt the need to explain who made Reservoir Dogs. But I am amused that the reaction to the suggestion is “Fuck Quentin Tarantino!” Truly a sentiment all right-thinking people can get behind, and I’m not ashamed to say that line was worth an extra half-star.

There’s not much sense of progression here, and far too much time spent on the trappings of lifestyle e.g. a Vegas trip that looks like nothing so much as a bad rap music video, rather than giving the characters or the scenario real substance. There’s the inevitable tension between the members of the gang, before the equally inevitable shootout with the Cubans. What there is not, is any sense of plausibility; I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly sure that, unlike Dee’s husband, I’d recognize my own wife if she tried to rob me, mask or not. Hopefully, I’ll never get to test that theory.

Dir: Wil Lewis
Star: Crystal the Doll, LA Love the Boss, Samantha “3D Na’Tee” James, Carmen Mi’chelle